The Melting of a Glacier Matters Even If It's Still Very Cold: Evangelicals and Trump

NOTE ON A NEW VERSION, NOVEMBER 2026: Although an earlier version of this now-much-revised article appeared in 2019 during a debate about Donald Trump's first impeachment, and at that time it called back to related debates in 2008, it has continuing relevance. Today I return to it in the context of the 2026 midterms which tend to support my long-running argument. Much has changed in the evangelical world since 2008, but there is significant continuity too. For today's occasion I've edited significantly to make the article read more clearly, since some specifics from 2019 have faded in memory. I should note how, as I write this new intro in 2026, Christianity Today magazine is in a crisis that in some ways is a ripple effect from things discussed below. But the main context today is the electoral success of religious liberal politicians such as James Talarico.

“Many evangelicals are likely to switch their loyalties to the Democrats [in the coming election]—and the exact numbers will depend partly on whether they perceive that mainstream liberals are treating them with nuance and respect, as opposed to stereotypes and contempt.”

I wrote that in 2008, during Obama's run for the presidency, in a context I will discuss shortly. It remains true today. Then, as now, there is tangible and realistic hope that Democrats can capture enough moderate evangelicals to swing the coming election—especially when combined with ex-evangelicals who are shrinking the raw numbers of an evangelical bloc plus various other left of center Christians—although a strong percentage of self-described evangelicals surely won’t budge.

When the recent editorial [that is, recent in 2019] from the flagship evangelical magazine Christianity Today [CT] appeared—calling for Trump’s removal and making a splash in the news cycle—I could easily predict how public responses to it would unfold. This is like a bus that comes down the street regularly, and I am tired of people on the left botching the analysis.

Four Stages of a Dysfunctional Discourse

Here’s the pattern: First, we can expect leaders of the organized Christian Right to jump onto FOX News and declare that CT—since the 1950s the top voice of a centrist evangelical establishment—has become irrelevant. Right on cue, Ralph Reed and Franklin Graham did just this. The Times duly reported that “Evangelical Leaders Close Ranks With Trump.”

Second, we can expect pundits on the left to also declare CT irrelevant, somewhat echoing right-wing talking points. They will call centrists like CT marginal compared to warriors like Graham, and will agree with Reed that for any leftist to valorize the evangelical center-right is false consciousness. (To Reed, this implies backsliding from "morality" while for the left it implies putting lipstick on an authoritarian pig.) Check! The always-first-to-the-punch Religion Dispatches (RD) published “Christianity Today Article Doesn’t Mean What You Think it Means,”  According to this piece, CT’s call for impeachment is “not going to change much” because CT “does not” and “can’t” represent “a broad evangelical constituency.” Supposedly such a role is “impossible"—despite RD granting that CT respects “the authority of empirical fact"—since everyone knows how real evangelicals are defined by an “authoritarian mindset” with “no room for dissent.”

Perhaps because this assertion about a lack of dissent within the evangelical world is obviously wrong—at least for anyone who respects empirical fact—RD’s writer slightly backpedaled: Well, OK, evangelicals do disagree. But supposedly they only disagree “between groups”—for example, Baptists vs Pentecostals—while “within groups” they put heavy pressure on their rank and file to conform. (Qualified in this way, the charge is not all wrong, but sadly it leads us precisely toward the sorts of internal cracks within an evangelical bloc that RD wants to define away.) In any case RD continues: even if evangelicals do disagree, still it holds true that they have a patriarchal and “tribaliz[ed]” DNA “incompatible with republican democracy.”

Third: we can expect the substantive religious opposition to Trump mainly to be bracketed from public discussion. I refer to a motley formation of left-liberal Christians drawn from Catholics, liberal Protestants, plus a few left-of-center evangelicals who might resonate with relatively-more-moderate CT articles. The parts of this network that overlap with CT readers are among the smallest and most lukewarm. But the whole is large even if the CT fraction is small. Meanwhile In twitter-sized discourse, whether conducted by evangelicals or secularists, evangelicalism is almost the only religion that matters, and by extension evangelical dissent is almost the only religious dissent that matters.

Fourth: we can expect the conversation to grind down into repetition and discursive chaos. All four of these steps had already happened before I finished drafting this first post on the day the story broke.

The process sticks in my craw. So here I am, pushing back against a logic that makes this pattern replay over and over.

Keeping It In Perspective: Why Cheers for Christianity Today Should Be Lukewarm

Let’s be crystal clear—CT's attack on Trump is far milder and more ambivalent than a full-throated religious left position such as William Barber’s. He rightly calls CT “anemic” and complains that it focused mainly “on an individual’s moral failings.” Despite a few punchy phrases, the call for impeachment had a loophole that allowed evangelicals to imagine everything as fine, provided only that Trump is removed—even if Mike Pence continues his policies. Confirming Barber's instinct, when CT’s editor went on MSNBC to restate his case, he mainly fretted that evangelical hypocrisy was undermining its “credible” leverage for “the pro-life cause.”

Moreover, CT has a track record of being slow to accept emerging positions during past sea changes in public opinion. (See this book and this one for excruciating detail, or contrast CT with this leftward competitor.) Most debates in CT lately—for example, about accepting women’s rights as “Biblically” defensible or dialing back condemnations of LGBTQ folks—address things that liberal Protestant compatriots processed decades ago and are bone tired of rehashing.

Nevertheless there are people in CT’s orbit who are grappling with such issues for the first time, and through no fault of their own. (I often teach such students, and I know them well). And from my scholarly study I know that CT’s past shifts toward centrism were often excellent signals that a process of change was consolidating. For example, when CT turned on Richard Nixon, this was one of the last nails in the coffin of his presidency. When they supported LGBTQ marriage rights, it was a strong signal that the tide had turned. Although these moves were far from heroic, they were not trivial.

Thus, although I feel like Sisyphus taking up these issues again, and I can only give CT lukewarm encouragement, I do defend its intervention. It matters because sincere people are still pondering these issues, because CT has now slightly widened cracks in evangelical disagreement, and because (if we pay attention) this can help us grasp how evangelical Trumpism is shrinking (not strengthening) the Republican base.

If critics claim that these considerations add up to nothing, or that they traffic in self-delusion because debates about evangelical values are “impossible,” this is simply wrong.

The New York Times and the Dysfunction Du Jour

Sarah Posner, one of RD’s top muckrakers of Christian Right dirt, scored a New York Times editorial entitled “That Christianity Today Editorial Won’t Change Anything.” She trumpets the same evidence that led me to agree above that we can “safely project ongoing Republican supermajorities” among white evangelicals. Does anyone deny this? Posner also showcases disturbing behaviors of evangelical Trumpism, drawn from worthy field research. All this is good. Unfortunately, the logic that structures it is the same as RD's and it dials up hostility to 11. Evangelicals are “insular” with “unwavering loyalty”; they organize as a “spiritual army” that is nearly impervious to outside evidence because it considers Trump a “divinely anointed leader.”

I responded as follows to Posner piece on a NYT readers comment thread:

CT probably has a readership that is 25% never-Trumper and 50% Democratic—so it’s a minority in the evangelical world—although it represents quite a few ministers who preach to Trump voters. I suppose some readers would turn around and support Cruz or Pence instead, and some will probably vote for Trump if he runs again.

[Still] this minority represents a non-trivial swing group electorally and shows that the idea of a solid 80% white evangelicals for the GOP is either slipping a little (agreed, not a lot) OR more importantly reflects a shrinking baseline “pool of 100%” because mainstream evangelical politics functions effectively as machine to produce EX-evangelicals.

A slip from 80% to 70% in white evangelical support, especially with a small baseline “pool of 100%,” would swing many elections. This is a non-trivial example of Trump’s base being a house of cards in some respects—although this is hard to judge behind all the bluffing on FOX. Posner is pointing to real problems, but she is not helping to solve them by overplaying the strength of the house of cards or the idea that evangelicals are a monolith.

Most of these ideas were drowned in a flood of punditry. Longstanding evangelical divisions, the fluidity of evangelical debates, and the presence of left evangelicals in wider left-Christian formations stayed out of focus. True, some folks in the liberal media did note that CT's editorial mattered for swing voters---but this got pushback from both left and right. Hardly anyone highlighted what I find most important—long-term shrinkage in the evangelical base and the question of where the defectors move.

Let’s belabor this. If you hear that 80% of self-declared white evangelical voters are solid for Trump—well, yes, polls do show this. But it is critical to understand that this is 80% of a 100% that is a moving target—a baseline that is leaking adherents and aging in ways that are alarming to leaders on the right.

The “white” in "white evangelical voters” is important. Twitter-sized punditry often posits maximal estimates of “evangelical” power as a bloc, conflates the whole bloc with white conservatives, and—poof!—both evangelicals of color (Asian, Latinx, and black) and liberalizing white evangelicals disappear. Meanwhile if we started from these latter two groups, then added never-Trump-types evangelicals who have now called for Trump's impeachment, this combined cohort includes a majority of evangelicals! Yes, everyone knows that the rightward part of the evangelical spectrum is large. Also that some of the moderate never-Trumpers might break for Pence. Still the situation is far from being so monolithic that these considerations can be defined away.

The Melting Glacier of White Evangelicals (Yes, Still Cold!)

More pointedly, the well-known “80% for Trump” datum that Posner uses to argue that nothing can change is a public relations disaster for the future of evangelicalism as a brand. The longer this number holds steady, the worse for the brand. It drives people away.  80% of a small and reviled group is not a long-term win. Approached in this context CT’s editorial is in some large part an effort at damage control.

No one should imagine CT’s never-Trumpism as a small new crack that will be easy to repair. Think of it as widening in one of several longstanding cracks—some of them already calving off chunks of a shrinking glacier. Who cares if the ice now in the water doesn’t show up when we measure the remaining glacier and discover that only 20% of that glacier is opposed to Trump? The key issues are how the glacier is melting and what happens to the ice breaking off.

Importantly, my glacier imagery does not imply that all the calving ice is melting into a category of “secular nones.” Part of it surely is—and too much media discourse assumes that most of it is—but we need to approach this issue “drop by drop” and find a way of measuring for which the categories of religious liberal or religious left are legible alongside “none.” That’s a longer discussion for another day.

Deja Vu: Can We Learn from the Past?

As noted above, I could predict how the latest CT media saga would unfold before it started. That's because I’ve been around the block before. During the Obama/McCain election of 2008, Pastor Rick Warren, a top evangelical leader at this time, hosted the candidates for a “faith forum” at his megachurch. What happened?

1. Partly he used it to promote an impression (half-true at best) that he wanted to be a neutral referee.

2. Partly he used it to lobby Obama to move rightward on abortion rights.

3. But importantly he signaled that sincere evangelicals should make up their own minds, and could legitimately decide to vote for Obama with Warren’s and/or Jesus’s blessing.

For those of us observing this forum from the left, the first two of these parts were annoying and the third was not something we found illuminating or heroic whatsoever. But here’s the point. Even if Warren should have been mortified that he had not figured out long ago that Christians can be Democrats, and even if he was a biased referee—nevertheless Warren did signal real waffling. He waffled in relation to constituents who were not monolithic but ranged across a hard-right to moderate-liberal spectrum. This really mattered for swing votes in the election—even if not in huge percentages, and even if some of these folks were midway in a process of becoming ex-evangelicalism, such that they might may no longer, today even be legible as part of the 20% minority of evangelical voters.

All this true whether or not centrist Democratic appeals to voters in Warren’s orbit create tricky trade-offs for holding together a larger Democratic bloc. I do agree that this is is a serious matter to debate, thinking from context to context, and I suspect it is the crux issue for RD.

I made these points, writing in RD, at the time, and the reason I could predict how this week's discourse would unfold is because I’ve watched it before. Gradually I learned that I am off-message from the main pundit discourse on evangelicals, and rarely welcome anymore at RD.

Still my arguments remain relevant for defeating Mr. Trump.

Let's be clear, I agree with left pundits like Posner that we should not encourage left-liberals to defer to CT-type evangelicals across the board—especially if evangelicals demand veto power over core priorities. Let's underline this, since it is important and slippery from issue to issue! My point is to favor an electoral coalition that is broad enough to include “non-cool” moderate evangelicals. In my mind, the point is not to tilt toward Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders, and simply about building winning coalitions for either one.

To do this we need to include people who are inconsistent in wokeness or may (within limits) even have troubling connections with some right-wing friends—provided that they will vote against Trump and support the fight against voter suppression. It does not help for building such a coalition—nor help us simply to understand what is going onif we posit that most evangelicals are so insular and authoritarian as to be impervious to persuasion.

Wokeness: Can Anyone Get There From Non-Wokeness?

I know for a fact that many of my “super-woke” friends went through stages of life when they were not super-woke. If people are raised in conservative networks, that is the place where they need to start—down a road of critically assessing what they were taught. Thus, if conservatives begin to think harder about strengths and weaknesses of standard evangelical talking points, I try to give them the benefit of doubt. I know from historical study and my own personal experience that stronger arguments often win out.

Of course this doesn’t always happen. But that's not because evangelicals are immune to argument, even if we think we can “know” they are based on stipulated definitions. Yes, pressure to conform is real with on the Christian Right.  But this is a two-edged sword because it may create equal and opposite pressure to leave.

By saying what I just said, I do not take a backseat to anyone in my frustration with many people in CT’s world. I want to be civil—but, honestly, how long should it take intelligent adults to discern that they can say out loud that Trump is unfit for office? And don’t get me started about other places I disagree with centrist evangelicals—especially their tendency to sneer at other kinds of Christian commitment and judge it irrelevant to (their own) real Christianity.

It’s just that I can remember how my own seven-year-old mind managed, with whatever sincerity that was relevant for me in 1964, to learn from an evangelical subculture that Barry Goldwater was cooler than Lyndon Johnson. I soon got over that lesson by learning more—but how and why I learned was not fully under my control, either at age seven or even seventeen.

Much of what I learned was “insular,” just as the left critics insist. It was also deeply entangled with other dubious strands such as God blessing US imperialism. But on the other hand, I also learned a a lot of my dissent, especially about economic injustice, from evangelical discourse. This was a language I was taught to speak.

Being raised to take my place as a white Republican evangelical did not stop me from rethinking it. On the contrary, evangelicalism—at least as I experienced it—pressed me further and further, first toward the margins of evangelicalism and soon out of it. The more I learned the faster I moved. For a brief moment, some of the brighter intellectuals in CT’s orbit kept me in their fold. Soon I moved on to ideas I found more persuasive.

This should not be hard to understand! In real life, lived religion is like speaking a complex language in which one can debate about values. Being fluent in a language does not lock you into one argument or set of priorities, even if there are dominant patterns from place to place. Anyone who wants to move away from a given pattern, or toward a different vernacular, needs to start by critiquing or translating what they inherited.

Conclusion: a Shrinking Glacier Matters Even If It Is Still Very Cold

Moving leftward from conservative Christianity is an extremely common pattern in US religious history.

“Who speaks for evangelicals?” is not a question that we can resolve with stipulated definitions, excluding all data that doesn’t fit under our definitions. This is a debate, and people with a tin ear who mainly insult their opponents, as opposed to respecting their opponent’s process and trying to persuade them, are likely to lose the debate. Simply using poll data to count fractions of self-identified evangelicals does not come anywhere near the heart of the question, because the stakes of this debate are how many people will come to renounce the evangelical label, as part of our glacier with chunks calving off.

So I repeat: a non-trivial minority of evangelicals—enough to be a significant swing group—will likely switch their loyalties to the Democrats. The exact numbers that split off—whether toward the small remant of anti-Trump evangelicals or more likely away from evangelicalism toward other religious and/or secular stances—will depend in some large part on whether they perceive that left-liberal critics are treating them with nuance and respect, as opposed to stereotypes and contempt.